Hello readers !
It’s been awhile since I have written a post. In LA we have had a natural disaster and a human-made disaster of our new president to contend with; all of this has consumed all the energy I have to keep going. Friends and family have lost their homes in both the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire and we are seeing the dismantling of the structures we rely upon daily happen before our eyes. Overwhelm and shock on a daily basis is hard on the system! How we keep going is step by step, day by day.
I wanted to offer a glimpse into what has been going on behind the scenes at Clockshop; a view into how we are continually learning to maneuver with the government agencies that serve us in support of public land and open space in our community. I have learned over the years that how this system works is very dependent upon personal connections and relationships that are built over time; we keep our electeds informed and remind them of what our neighbors need and want in their community. We need to do this on a regular basis or else the system doesn’t work.
Three weeks ago Sue and I went to Sacramento for a day of meetings with staffers of District 26 Senator Maria Elena Durazo, and District 52 Assemblymember Jessica Caloza, and with the Director Quintero and Deputy Director Liz McGuirk of California State Parks. Our mission was to talk with all of them about the progress that we have made in raising money and awareness for the future State Park at the Bowtie.
It has been a decade + of collective organizing to get this park built and we are close but still not 100% there yet. Specifically, we are looking for $2 million or maybe $6 million—which in the scheme of how money is spent in this State is not much, but it is still a lot. Why $2M or maybe $6M? Because the federal dollars that we have worked so hard to win, $5M coming from National Park Service and $1M coming from the EPA, might go away. At this moment, we do not know what will happen.
Our first meeting was with staffer Bethany Renfree in Senator Maria Elena Durazo’s office. Bethany has been part of Senator Durazo’s staff since the beginning of her first term. She listened carefully, remembering that Senator Durazo made the initial ask for $500K for concept design and outreach and engagement from the State General Fund back in 2019. We and she were successful in getting those funds for California State Parks since the Governor approved this request in June 2019. Over 2020 and 2021 conceptual design happened and the community approved the plans overwhelmingly. Bethany remarked that we had done so much with so little money. A good reminder to us!
We next met with Assemblymember Jessica Caloza, one of the newbies to the California State legislature. We updated her on our progress, we encouraged her to come out and meet us at the Bowtie and briefed her that we might be following up with a request to appropriate funds for the Bowtie from Prop 4 which passed last November.
Prop 4, I’ll remind you readers, for those who don’t remember, is the Climate Bond that most likely all of you voted for. It’s been an education for me, personally, to learn what it means when you vote for something that you want to see in your community and then how you actually bring those benefits to your community. Within the Climate Bond there are earmarks for urban parks in low-income communities, there is money to build structures in urban parks, there is an earmark for California State Parks, there is focus on the LA River. Our little 18 acres fits into so many of these categories. This bond measure could be our salvation if we could just figure out how to access those funds.
Our meeting with Director Quintero and Deputy Director Liz McGuirk went well also. Sue and I delved into questions about what is happening with the Waterways Connection Initiative at California State Parks which was passed by Rendon and specifically addresses waterways in urban areas. Wouldn’t this program and fund be perfect for the Bowtie? How do we learn more about these funds and where they are going? We are patiently hopeful that there might be something in there for our little parcel of 18 acres.
I will leave you with this snapshot, readers.
Yesterday I was on a call with our Program Officers for the EPA. We were discussing the $1M that has been committed to the Bowtie to fund spot remediation of soil. The good news was that only spot remediation is needed and it might come in for under $1M. The diligent public servants we spoke with (all women, all who have worked at the EPA for close to two decades) are most concerned that the money go to California State Parks to be used for this purpose and they want to do everything in their power to make that happen quickly. There are tedious bureaucratic hurdles to this, of course, but every woman on the call was diligently working together to help one another to make this happen. At the end of the call our grant officer said, “If on March 14th congress is unable to pass a budget to fund the government, we might go dark. We do not know what is going to happen.”
Folks – We do not know what will happen. I want to rally everyone who is reading and convey how motivated I am to get these funds and also how PISSED OFF I AM – these funds are ours. These government agencies are ours and we need to fight to protect them. Please get ready to throw down to protect our funds and public lands and so much more. To stay informed around all issues concerning public lands I have found AltNationalParksService on BlueSky to be awesome and also sign up on Our Parks.